From: "Henry Lee" Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 22:09:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Submission "PERMAFROST" (June 28th) (Please keep headers) ============================== Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative From: lee@aries.phys.yorku.ca (Henry Lee) Subject: PERMAFROST (1/1) -- shiny and NEW [XF:FtF film spoilers] Date: 27 Jun 1998 23:14:06 -0400 Organization: York University, Toronto, Canada PERMAFROST (1/1) [XF:FtF film spoilers] This story is based on characters created by Chris Carter et al., Ten Thirteen productions and Fox Television. I have used the principal characters with "reckless abandon" but I intend no infringement of copyright. This story may be distributed freely and, hopefully, with the author's blessing. Eight months pass by and nary a peep, but one week passes and out comes two. The film is an obvious and mighty good trigger. Thanks to Hindy Bradley for a much-needed objective look, supplying constructive comments of great insight, and reminding me above all about "focus." Rating : PG Category: V, MSR, A (VRA) Spoilers: "The X-Files: Fight the Future" film spoilers Summary : After Texas/Antarctica, Mulder considers his actions of the last 96 hours. ------------------------- PERMAFROST by Henry Lee ------------------------- Contact is characterized by the meeting of two objects or two living beings. In my case, I'd been given the opportunity to come in contact with "little green men." Only they weren't little, green or men, but big, amorphous, ugly, and completely alien. I'd seen the ship, too, for all the good that it'll do me now. I have no evidence. But that's not important. Contact in a macroscopic sense is defined by two surfaces in close proximity, so close that atoms "touch" and essentially Coulomb repulsion takes over. Electrons from atoms on the one surface and electrons from atoms on the other surface push against each other as the distance between the atoms is reduced at that sub-sub-microscopic level. I wouldn't know about being repelled. But I know everything about attraction. Five years funnelled into five seconds. A chasm was reduced suddenly to mere millimeters. Contact. Vanishingly quick. Swift. A spark. Electric. The touch of your lips was smooth and sweet. Everything to me was savoured in that tiny moment. The evidence of our simple interaction cannot be programmed, categorized, or referenced. They can not, will not have this. After five years, I count on some things being right. I've been known to make a few correct hunches, too. Five years between us has proved another hunch of mine to be accurate. Is it strange then to consider another definition of what is "right?" I don't mean that vague definition of morality whereupon people make choices and decisions, affecting the timelines of other people's lives. It's not about what we had brought to each other. It's how we'd been brought to the table cloaked by subterfuge, obfuscation, and extermination, how you and I got dealt into this shady business of the all-encompassing world/XT conspiracy. Sometimes I try not to think about the pieces of the greater whole. It almost drives me mad to consider all the people that have filtered through the conspiracy to affect all the little pieces in the grand puzzle. Now, I focus on only one thing. Declared lost in the midst of the X-Files, mislaid to misguided fortunes, lapsed in pursuit of my sister, my own heart has been until now missing in action. My recovery began when you entered my life with a caring heart and courage to spare. I return to this secret place with a new array of thoughts. I've reined in my dreams, which have subsequently been stored into my vast collection. I return to this special place reliving and knowing what had to come, standing in the hallway, our arms embracing, our hands touching each other. You came back to me, your face still spotted with dirt and sweat from our running around Texas. Your eyes radiated tempered luminescence, reflecting to me a mixture of so many things. Your fatigue, your sense of defeat at having been transferred to Salt Lake City, the loss which you'd already accepted even before you arrived to tell me, and something else which I am only now beginning to acknowledge. I imagine that's something similar you saw in my eyes. It's the way you left my apartment so quickly; said what you had to say and got out before I could convince you with words or if I'd ever looked at you. There would be consequences if we really searched each other. The truth we'd sought for so long was now between us. We say so much to each other this way, Scully, when little else can explain or qualify what we do with and what we are to each other. But we never manage to come forward and actually say the words. Have we always been so unyielding in our ways? We're afraid of what hearing the words will do, that they might become tangible to describing the intangible. We're afraid that words might somehow lessen the impact of how we feel. We play this game where we're supposed to understand what the other is feeling and how the other is doing. We don't say a thing to each other; not really, not until one of us is one step from the brink. We will, however, allow one another to go as far as possible. We'll trust that one of us will reach for the other when the time comes, regardless of consequence, for whatever is necessary. We've been sidestepping around what's really important to us. We've been dancing around this until I think what we both thought was the right time. How could anything I say capture anything that could possibly come close to embracing the sweet incorporeal aether that has bonded me to you? Your resignation, Scully, however put a crimp into our dance routine. Letting you know what you've done for me was one of those things I've been saving. I guess that's my reason why I hadn't said anything to you before. I couldn't let you simply leave without telling you. My debt to you surpasses anything that I can ever give to you. Swimming in your liquid eyes was the realization that we'd both understood too clearly that getting here, to this point had been everything. What had been illuminating was seeing the time and pressure cooked element of our connection, captured like a fine jewel sparkling from the truth between us. We've always shared this spiritual union. Wasn't it about time we started something a little more substantial? When I realized you were resigning, you asked me if my heart was still in it. I didn't know how to answer the question. The answer here in the hallway was now clear. Oh yes, Scully, I can say truthfully that my heart had been fully into it. I wanted to steal a few more seconds of your breath. The bee had incredible timing. It seems to be the story of our partnership and how we seem to be caught at a certain place at a certain time. I was caught in an incredible storm of arousal and letdown, checking your neck, feeling the slight swelling of your skin and holding your head against me, thinking how so much I wanted to kiss you again. What a relief to hear your voice in my mind when I could have just as easily heard the vacuum of solitude. And losing my brains on a street in Georgetown was not my idea of leaving this mortal coil. I endured forty-eight hours of change, calling in big favors, flying on planes, and haggling for transport. I tried to remain calm and rational. I spent every minute of those hours reliving the last five years and five seconds of unfinished business. But the growing hunger within me was tight and desperate and a sense of bitterness was forming on my tongue. I was openly wondering if I'd get another chance at words or more. What I didn't tell you was that if you had really quit, I would've been unable to continue my journey alone. Instead, I might have asked to accompany you on your own path. We would have really entered new and uncharted territory then, wouldn't we? I would've walked away from the X-Files and I would've conceded them their victory. But I would have found something new in walking after you. But you and I both know we can not let things go as they are. They are too many questions which remain unanswered. I've cried out to the heavens over gross injustices to the human race. However, I've come to shout much louder for the both of us. What has become especially heartwrenching is knowing what they have done to you. I have reserved a special place in my heart for you and Emily. This was the place where I drew needed strength to prepare me for what was to come. A heart of stone, a block of ice, and, like the cool vial of misplaced eggs which I once held melting in my hand, the braintrust filled with stunned silence. I was hot, sweaty, cold, exhausted, numb, and frightened. It's what I felt when I found you encased in ice. Dismay was quickly replaced by the sudden rush of relief, gently cresting and rolling through me in waves. Like healing the surface of a cracked and wounded heart. We were surrounded by embryos trying to break free and I was desperately helping you breathe, by giving you my breath to steal a few more seconds. You were resuscitated, in time for your treasured smile, complete with beautiful white teeth. I would've stayed right there to cherish the moment, but all hell was breaking loose and we had to move. And, Scully, you had me big time. I regained once more the delicious promise of touching you before I could forget. But we've stepped up to death's doorstep far too often. You came for me in the Arctic and you saved me with your science. Saving you in Antarctica meant that we could live, moving forward and reinvesting significant effort to our work. I think I'll gain true happiness without ever seeing again endless fields of snow and ice. I must have been delirious. I regained consciousness and being held safely in her arms softened the jarring blow of realizing we were sitting on Antarctic ice and a million miles from home. "Unnnhhh ... please tell me that Dorothy and Toto have come by to take us home." "Mulder ... Mulder ..." Her voice was still cracked, damaged by her frozen captivity. But my name held a very different and melodic quality I'd never heard from her. I shifted and turned around to look at her. My mind was still fuzzy, but it had faintly registered the fact that her arms still hadn't left me. "Are you all right, Scully?" A beat. A look. A thousand emotions tumbling good and bad. "I'm ... I feel like a gooey popsicle that's been turned inside out, but other than that, Mulder, I'm fine." I smile, understanding nothing and seeing everything. "I'm glad. Next time we decide to get away from it all, could we choose a warmer place?" "Not up to me. Next time, put in a request with Skinner." She's kidding, right? I really can't tell. She's *got* to be kidding ... "Scully ... if I issued a request with Skinner, I'm afraid he'd send us back to Dallas for remediation. I don't think even free beer night at the Astrodome would make up for that kind of punishment." "Mulder, I'm kidding." "Oh." "You had that look on your face again." "No, I didn't ..." "Yes, you did ..." "Do we have to go through this again?" Our exchange is liberating and we're grinning like idiots. I put my hand up to her face, feeling her warmth. Mimicking something which feels like it happened a billion years ago. Another multitude of feelings pass between our eyes. Not now, but definitely sooner than later. "Take me home, Mulder." She graces me with another gift of her smile, a little piece of heaven in a place of frozen tundra. Getting home, let alone back to North America ... let alone getting *off* the Antarctic was a real adventure. It took another couple of days, but it didn't matter. She was here, real and alive, and I was with her. I think we were getting to a new comfort level with each other, even though we'd said little on our way home. I filled her in on some of the details about our British contact and how I was able to find her. We didn't say much more past that. We did nothing to break the rising tide of charm between us. Recently, we've swapped our roles of believer and skeptic, only to come out unscathed from these trials. I was happily surprised when it was you trying to convince me that we should remain together. When you came back after your OPR meeting with Cassidy, I was not a happy camper. Once again, they were removing evidence and hiding all traces of their work. I was sick and tired with starting over from scratch. "Go be a doctor," "save yourself," "get away from me," I implored. Instead, you were telling me that you wanted to work with me and stay with me, that we had everything that mattered between us right here and now. Who is most brave and courageous, the one battered but not beaten, who rises from the fire which had threatened to consume but in the end had sought for purification? What does it means to have the X-Files again? I've seen what that unnamed British man had termed `the Project' and the grand scale to which their plans had been carried out in the last five decades. Feeling the ground shake, the snow all around us collapsing impossibly, seeing the enormous ship above us stirred once again the fire I'd thought been extinguished. The thought of continuing conveyed a new sense of purpose, even with everything that had been brought to bear on us. In many ways, it really *was* like starting over again. A new office, the X-Files were ours once more and we were together. I'm sitting and thinking in my apartment and it's well after midnight. I can't sleep. What else is new? I'm oddly contented but damn, I can't get two winks worth beans. What's set in my thoughts now is that I have what's important. (Who is responsible for this?) I will answer the question ... (You will answer the question now.) I will answer the question as I reveal the source of their folly, the one responsible for saving me from being consumed. I am truly grateful. The one who is responsible refuses to be programmed, catalogued, and referenced. Her name is Dana Scully. She is my partner and my friend. I roll my tongue around that last word. I'm trying to come up with something else which can accurately describe what we have. I can't. But something new is happening between us, growing with each passing day. I love her and it's all right. There is a soft knock on the door. She's here. -- END -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please address all comments to . First posted to alt.tv.x-files.creative at 0313h UT on Sunday, June 28, 1998. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Henry Lee http://aries.phys.yorku.ca/~lee/ Dept. of Physics & Astronomy E-mail: lee@yorku.ca York University, 4700 Keele St. Phone: (416) 736-2100 x66391 Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada Fax: (416) 736-5516